(Tense music building up)
- Yeah, this is Dean.
- [Narrator] Phillip Seymour Hoffman is synonymous
with Paul Thomas Anderson.
He shows up in each of his first four films,
not necessarily at the center of them.
What's interesting about Hoffman is that
he moves his way kind of from the edges of the movie,
more towards the middle,
to the extent that the ensemble films
can even be said to have a middle.
- Okay.
I'm going to let a cigarette now old-timer.
See the thing is,
I like you
and I'm gonna light a cigarette.
I'm gonna let you
have this time to place your bet
before I finish lighting this cigarette.
And then when I finish lighting,
I'm just gonna roll.
Fuck you.
(laughs)
- [Narrator] There's this absolutely
remarkable little performance
in Hard Eight,
just Paul Thomas Anderson's first film
by an unknown young actor named Phillip Seymour Hoffman
who plays this craps player at a casino
staring down this much older,
more experienced gambler,
played by Philip Baker hall.
And the character is so obnoxious.
He's so obnoxious.
He's unbearable.
Like you're not just relieved when he loses,
but you're relieved when he disappears.
But you're also sad to see him go
because he's just electrifying.
And I think that
for the people who saw Hard Eight
in real time,
it was one of those little performances within a movie
that's just a revelation,
like who is this guy?
And Phillip Baker Hall
gave interviews at the time
to saying the same thing,
which is just that this was an actor
who showed up and had so much craft
and so much skill that he hijacked this movie
that has filmmaker Hall, John C. Reilly,
and also big stars
like at the time,
like Gwyneth Paltrow
and Samuel Jackson.
Like you leave the movie
kind of remembering this performer.
- That's for you, big time.
All right I'm not even looking,
- [Announcer] Here we go.
Six.
A hard six.
- Hard six
that's a hard six old-timer.
That's not bad for me.
That's not bad for me
as your sister.
- Hey.
- Hi.
Dirk,
Dirk Diggler.
(laughs)
- Scotty.
- Yeah.
- [Narrator] The Boogie Nights.
He plays Scotty.
Who's this kind of level arm camera operator.
Who's very much on the edges of the porn film scene
in the San Fernando valley in the '70s.
His job puts him on the edges.
He's not in front of the camera.
He's not the director.
He's barely behind the camera.
He's often holding a boom mic.
Mark Bridges was instructed to dress Hoffman
like he was a 14 year old boy.
So you see Hoffman with his stomach
hanging out a little bit,
looking really out of style
and certainly out of shape
compared to Mark Wahlberg.
And the character doesn't have much of an arc.
He has sort of one spectacular scene.
The way he does in Hard Eight,
where Scotty confesses
this sort of unrequited crush on character,
Eddie Adams also known as Dirk Diggler.
The porn star played by Wahlberg.
- You wanna go for a ride or?
- Wait wait wait wait.
Fuck.
How much time...
- I'm sorry.
- What the hell is the matter with you.
- I'm sorry(stammering).
Why did you do that, Scotty?
- You look at me sometimes. - What!
I just wanna know if you like me.
- Of course (sighs).
Yeah, I like you Scotty.
- Can I kiss you.
- Scotty I don't...
- Please can I kiss you on the mouth?
- No.
- Please let me...
- Scotty.
- I'm really sorry.
I didn't mean to grab you like that
or scare you or anything.
- It's all right.
- Do you wanna kiss me or...
- Scotty?
- No.
- [Narrator] There's something that I think
about a scene like this
watching it today,
that I think people might take issue
with defining this gay character entirely
in these kind of melancholy closeted terms.
The fact that he doesn't really seem to have an arc
beyond this crush he has on Wahlberg,
which is played for laughs
most of the time.
Brutally rejected
and then just kind of disappears
from the movie.
So I don't know if the writing really honors Scotty,
but Hoffman is incredible in the sequence.
He's incredible at seeming a little buzzed
and a little drunk.
He's incredible at seeming hesitant.
He sells the idea that Scotty
is just trying to show a Dirk his car.
He sells the fumbling advance
and he is so heartbreaking
when he's trying to just regain
his kind of casual composure
act like it's not a big deal.
And then the scene ends very famously
with him sort of alone in the car,
just berating himself
and calling himself in idiot.
- (Crying) Fucking idiot.
I'm a fucking idiot.
- [Narrator] And it hurts.
It's a scene that regardless of the dramatic particulars
or regardless of the cultural implications of it,
I think a lot of people watching the movie
can feel they've been there in some form or another.
And there's just no sense of craft.
- Fucking Idiot.
- [Narrator] That idea of empathy
then just gets magnified
in the work he does in Magnolia,
where he plays a caregiver to a TV producer
played by Jason Robards.
Who's terminally ill with cancer,
and he's a kind of almost living figure.
He's at the edges of this big dysfunctional family tragedy,
which he simultaneously is trying to keep out of
while also fixing.
'Cause as the movie goes on,
his plot line is trying to reunite Robards
with his estranged son.
His actual son,
played by Tom cruise.
And if it's possible to be magnetic
and self-effacing at the same time,
that's what Hoffman's doing.
He's playing a guy who's just trying to help.
And he keeps referring to himself this way.
Even when he's on the phone,
trying to track people down,
he's like, "I'm the guy who needs help".
And he also gives the movie
a self-reflective dimension.
'Cause he refers to himself a few times
as a character in a movie.
You know, this is the scene of the movie
where someone reaches out.
This is the scene in the movie where you help me.
And it's such a mechanical role on some level
that if it wasn't such a good actor
and if it wasn't an actor
who threw a combination of his hair,
and his nurses wardrobe,
and his absolute openness.
If he couldn't sell the idea
of the total goodness of Phil Parma,
I think the character would be weak.
And Magnolia is a movie where I think the characters
are sometimes only as strong or as weak
as the actors playing them.
There's a lot of good actors in the movie.
There's a lot of uneven writing in the movie,
but Hoffman is just,
he's never wrong for even a second.
And he gets probably in a way,
the funniest and most severe moment of the movie
at the same time,
because when the inexplicable rain of frogs
comes at the end,
which some people see as the logical culmination
of this biblical parable about punishment and atonement
and other people think is just Anderson
couldn't end the movie.
So he threw in a rain of frogs.
He's the one who kind of sees it,
and he asks like,
" Why are frogs raining from the sky?"
And it's a funny line and Hoffman gets the humor in it,
but he pushes it somewhere else.
He's so confused that for a moment,
the audience sort of becomes off struck
just by his line reading.
(dogs barking) (wood crashing noises)
- All the frogs falling from the sky!
- Shut up.
Shut the fuck up.
- If you're all right detect...
- Shut up.
Will you...
Shut up. Shut up.
Shut, shut, shut, shut, shut up.
Shut up.
Now.
- [Narrator] Punch-Drunk Love is such an odd movie.
Its narrative is so weirdly asymmetrical
and the psychology of Adam Sandler character
is so bizarre.
And then you finally fill in this character
as his nemesis.
And there's a way in which Punch-Drunk Love
feels a bit like a superhero movie
that Sandler's character is always dressed in blue
and Emily Watson's always dressed in red,
and it's like they're destined to kind of come together.
She appears out of nowhere.
He seems to have superhuman strength.
And when he finally confronts Dean,
he sort of terms him as the mattress man,
which is a pretty good super villain name.
And Dean's having his hair worked on.
And he's got this cloak on,
which is very super villainy,
sort of, you know,
in his layer.
And Hoffman just makes him a venal asshole
who Sandler's Barry Egan needs to stand up to.
What's funny is ultimately in the end,
how little power Dean has.
They're sort of reverse mirror images of each other.
'Cause they're both lonely.
They're both entrepreneurs.
They're both kind of beta male characters.
Barry might be like the only person in the world
that someone like Dean can successfully bully.
- I'm a nice man.
I mind my own business.
So you tell me that's that
before I beat the hell from you.
I have so much strength in me
you have no idea.
I have a love in my life.
It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.
- [Narrator] In The Master
he's finally moved to the exact center of the movie.
He's not a one scene character.
He's not an afterthought.
He's not self-effacing.
He's not like a bad guy even.
He's the title character.
And you could argue that the movie
is more about Freddie Quell
played by Joaquin Phoenix,
and that the film is from Freddie's point of view,
but Hoffman dominates the movie.
And he dominates the movie
because he's playing a cult leader.
He's playing as a figure of incredible charisma.
Someone who has a mast, a group of followers,
people who kind of hang on his every word.
And within the movie's power dynamic,
he's on top for most of it.
(flute playing)
In order to play the character,
what Hoffman does is something very unusual for him,
which is he abandons naturalism entirely.
And he plugs into a theatricality that's modeled,
not so much on L. Ron Hubbard.
Who's the characters historical model,
but on Orson Welles.
He's playing a plummy absurd version of Welles.
It's Welles with his mercury radio voice.
It's Welles at his most magnetic,
in citizen Kane.
It's this protean
acting all the time performance,
which makes sense for Lancaster dog
that he's on all the time
because he doesn't want anyone to see
when he barely wants people to think that he's human.
He wants people to think that he's a vessel for the divine,
a vessel for some great knowledge.
And he's also trying to convince himself.
Like this is a guy
who is very much buying his own bullshit at all times.
- (stammers)If you already know the answers
to your questions,
then why ask.
Pig fuck.
- [Narrator] He had a scumminess that he was happy
to sort of try and play with.
I think Anderson knowing him so well,
working with him so closely in so many films
knew how to activate that scumminess again,
just in the right proportion.
♪ Her eyes are blue ♪
♪ Her cheeks are Red ♪
♪ McLare what are you say ♪
♪ Her eyes are blue ♪
♪ Her cheeks are Red ♪
♪ The world of her is on her head. ♪
(crowd laughing)
- Now get the fuck outta here pervert.
- Didn't I warn you.
- That's that.
(soft music)